Differences in economic conditions between the big advanced economies are widening

US economy

Has recovered strongly in June quarter from its early 2014 weather-related weakness, and business surveys point to a solid moderately paced upturn and will encourage the Fed to progress cautiously toward ending its relatively loose monetary policy.

Eurozone and Japan

The situation is quite different in the Euro-zone and Japan. Although they still point to growth,

In a recent survey of our mentoring client much has been discussed on the changing landscape for businesses. In particular the reduction in business growth and jobs. For example, in certain markets of the manufacturing industry and a range of other businesses, this has led many clients to question where their potential future economic growth should be aimed at.

For the coming year Australia should look at its external environments and the possible impacts on our economies.
The World Environment

The world’s economic regions and 230 nations and sovereign states can be separated into old news and tomorrow’s future news. The old news are the EU, Japan and the USA which together had 55% of the worlds GDP in the late 1990s, that has fallen to 42% and falling fast.

We conducted our annual survey of our mentoring clients in November 2012 and had a 71% response rate. The Mentees were asked to rank their experience with their international Business Mentor in respect of various factors.

The table below shows that the factors ranked highest by our mentees in the Excellent column are Sounding Board, Strategy development, Ideas generation, Better business performance and Own motivation. The lower half in the excellent column are Personal performance improvement,

Why 2012 you may ask? The power of this article comes from accepting the limitations of society’s capacity and capability to keep up with the rate of change of technology used to replace people in the decision making processes of modern business, hence the need for time to establish a limiting boundary. Change is the law of life!

Abstract

This article is about a journey of discovery focused on the impacts and side-effects of the rapid rate of change of technology used by modern business in gaining and maintaining that elusive competitive advantage.